AP may be the world’s largest competency-based learning program. It has expanded access to college credit opportunities for million of students (and has proven far more scalable than other efforts like early college high schools). Both are enormous contributions. But there’s an opportunity to make three big contributions in the balance of this decade:

Move the tests online. Not many students write by hand anymore; it’s crazy to make them do it on a test.

Make multiple testing windows available (e.g., 6-8 times annually) to support competency-based learning.

Encourage the development of personalized and adaptive content with a prize aimed at advances in the most popular courses.

Incorporate automated scoring to drive down test administration costs and improve the quality of performance tasks.

With all of the colleges going bankrupt, College Board could buy one and offer credit directly. They could even offer an AA degree–making it a massive online early college program available (one way or another) to almost every student in the US.

Add upgrading AP to David Coleman’s list of opportunities as the incoming CEO and another reason his selection was a big deal.